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Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape. Rather than empty space, black holes are chock full of matter that gets squeezed into a teensy space.  Who discovered black holes? Physicist Karl Schwarzschild accidentally discovered black holes in 1916, when he was figuring out a particular solution to Einstein's general theory of relativity. He was trying to find the solution to the gravitational pull of a single, solitary, symmetric ball of matter — such as the sun at the center of our solar system. But that solution contained a peculiar feature: the theory behaved strangely at a specific radius, known today as the Schwarzschild radius. It was later realized why this radius was so special. If you compressed the mass of an object into a space smaller than that radius, its gravitational pull would overwhelm every known force and nothing could escape. Early physicists assumed that this situ...

What if the world of dark matter was a mirror of our own, just with a broken set of rules? That might explain why dark matter appears to be so abundant yet invisible, a new theory suggests. Dark matter is the mysterious, unknown substance that seems to make up the bulk of all the mass in the universe; for every 2 pounds (1 kilogram) of regular matter, there's roughly 10 pounds (5 kg) of dark matter. It doesn't interact with light or normal matter. The only way scientists can detect it is through its subtle gravitational influence on normal matter, such as the motions of stars within galaxies and the growth of super-large structures in cosmic time. It might be easy to think that because matter and dark matter operate with different rules, one would be totally dominant over the other. But despite having wildly different properties, the amounts of normal matter and dark matter are still in the same ballpark. That seems like a strange coincidence.  To explain this, scientis...

A physicist from the University of Campinas in Brazil isn’t a big fan of the idea that time started with a so-called Big Bang. So Instead, Juliano César Silva Neves imagines a collapse followed by a sudden expansion, one that could even still carry the scars of a previous timeline. Updated version of the previous article. The idea itself isn’t new, but Neves has used a fifty-year-old mathematical trick describing black holes to show how our Universe needn’t have had such a compact start to existence. At first glance, our Universe doesn’t seem to have a lot in common with black holes. One is expanding space full of clumpy bits; the other is mass pulling at space so hard that even light has no hope of escape. But at the heart of both lies a concept known as a singularity – a volume of energy so infinitely dense, we can’t even begin to explain what’s going on inside it. “There are two kinds of singularity in the Universe,” says Neves. “One is the alleged cosmological singularity,...